


A Story About Witches

by groveofbones



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 14:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15632961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: The people living around the Citadel at least knew what to expect from Joe. They had no idea what to expect from the people who had killed him. The defeat of such a powerful, ruthless war lord could only mean one thing: witchcraft.Or, the new inhabitants of the Citadel through outsiders' eyes.





	A Story About Witches

Everyone in the vicinity of the Citadel knew Joe. Every lone madman, every band of feral or half-feral scavengers, every medium-sized war party trying to assert themselves while staying under the Citadel’s radar: they all knew Joe. 

 

They knew him as a monster, a figure of legendary malice. They knew that if they fell into his grasp, he’d kill them or cut them up for parts or drain them of blood or whatever other grim fate he could come up with. They knew he was someone to be feared. 

 

But there was one advantage to Joe: he was a known entity. 

 

So when the word went out through the desert that Joe was dead, that someone else, someone completely unknown, had taken his place at the head of the Citadel, it started ripples of combined relief and panic. On the one hand, Joe was gone, and all his dangers with him. 

 

On the other hand, no one knew the new masters of the Citadel. No one knew what they were capable of. 

 

The first reports weren’t exactly reassuring. People passed along stories, heard first- or second- or third-hand, about Joe’s car showing up at the gates to the Citadel with the Immortan’s torn body on display. A bloodied, half broken warrior woman was taken up into the Citadel, accompanied by four perfect, unscarred, unblemished girls. 

 

How could they have killed the Immortan? How could they have destroyed his war party? How could they have taken the Citadel with only one injured warrior?

 

There seemed to be only one answer. And so, the word echoed and whispered its way through all the inhabitants of the desert: _witches_. 

 

***

 

“They say that Joe’s face had been erased from his body.”

 

“No, they say that his whole head was cut off.”

 

“No, burned off.”

 

“No, it just vanished as if it had never been there. Not a drop of blood.”

 

“That’s not what I heard. I heard there was a lot of blood.”

 

“Maybe that’s how they absorbed his power. They must have drunk his blood.”

 

“They couldn’t have drunk the blood of the entire war party.”

 

“You don’t know what they could do. Insatiable thirst, I’ve heard. I’ve heard they drink the blood of everyone who passes through their gates.”

 

“I heard they use their bodies to make potions and charms.”

 

The whispers went on and on.

 

***

 

“Whatever it is they do, no one who goes in ever comes out. That’s what I’ve heard.”

 

“That’s true, that’s true. Black Cora said she was leading her people to the Citadel to see what was going on, and she never came back.”

 

Rat tightened his grip on his cup of rum, leaning forward eagerly to catch every word, his mind full of dreams about battling fearsome witches, but Crow just wrinkled her nose. “That’s stupid, Bess,” she said, cutting into the conversation. “Black Cora said herself that she wanted to see if they’d let her pledge them her service. She’d heard they call it the Green Place now, that it’s a paradise. That’s probably why she and her people didn’t come back, because they decided to stay. Sashi and his folks did the same thing six months ago.”

 

Old Bess and the scrap traders she’d been talking with turned to scowl at Crow. “What does she know about it?” one of the traders, a square-faced man with a scar across his mouth.

 

“Nothing,” Old Bess said scornfully. “She’s just a kid. She think she knows everything.”

 

“I know better than to believe in witches,” Crow shot back, glaring. “Rat doesn’t believe either, do you, Rat?”

 

Rat froze. He hadn’t been expecting to be dragged into this. 

 

Old Bess laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? Look at him, he’s practically pissing himself.” Rat drew himself up indignantly, ready to announce that he absolutely wasn’t afraid, but Bess just talked over him. “He’s got a bit more sense than you do, though not much. Alright then, Miss Crow, if you’re so smart, how do you think those little girls killed the king, then? Joe had more power than anyone in the desert.”

 

“Well it isn’t witchcraft, anyway. There’s no such thing as witches. Come on, Rat, this is a stupid conversation.” Crow stood up with all the dignity that an underfed 19-year-old could muster and strode away with her nose in the air. Rat tossed back the last of his whiskey and stood to follow her.

 

“I’m not afraid of any witches,” he said firmly, and whirled on his heel. He ignored Bess and the scrap traders’ laughter behind him; the idiots wouldn’t know a good dramatic exit if it hit them in the face.

 

His heart sunk when he found Crow. She was already loading up their battered motorcycle. “Bess is just an old slanger who likes to piss people off,” Rat said reasonably. “We’ve got a decent patch here, no need to burn the forest for the trees.”

 

“We’re not leaving forever, Rat!” Crow said, turning on him with her eyes alight with excitement. Rat knew that look. He called it Adventure Crow, or sometimes Idiot Crow, and it usually led to trouble. “We’re going to the Citadel. We’re going to check it out, see for ourselves that there aren’t no witches there. Then we’ll come back and be able to tell everyone the truth!”

 

“Davey might not take us back if we leave without his permission,” Rat said, but he was already being won over, and Crow knew it.

 

“Come on, Rat,” Crow said, grinning triumphantly. “Don’t you want to do something exciting for a change? Don’t you want to have an adventure? Tell everyone that you saw the Citadel and lived to tell the tale?”

 

“Well…” Rat shrugged. “When else am I going to have the chance to fight a witch?”

 

Crow rolled her eyes. “There’s no such thing as witches, Rat.” But she didn’t argue the point further, because Rat was helping her finish securing their meager possessions into the bike’s saddlebags. 

 

They thought they’d avoided anyone noticing them as they wheeled the bike away from the camp, but just as Crow was straddling the bike and pushing up the kickstand, Rat grabbed her arm and pointed behind them. They watched, with a sinking feeling in their chests, as an enormous man came down from one of the watchpoints on the outskirts of the camp and walked toward them, clearly in no hurry. They didn’t move. Even in the dark, they could tell it was Davey; no one else in the little war band was as big as him. 

 

Rat and Crow had taken up with Davey’s people almost a year ago. It had been better, for the most part, than being two kids alone in the desert, and if they were being honest had probably kept them alive this long. That didn’t change the fact that quiet, glowering Davey intimidated them at best, scared the hell out of them at worst. 

 

He came to a stop right in front of their bike, crossed his arms, and stared them down. For several seconds, both Crow and Rat met his eyes defiantly. He waited until they’d both broken and looked down at the ground before he spoke. 

 

“So,” he said. “What the hell you doing?”

 

“We’re going to find out the truth about the Citadel,” Crow said, her voice sounding a lot less determined than it had a few minutes before. 

 

Davey let the silence drag out again, agonizingly, before he said, “You kids get into a fight with Bess, suddenly you’re tearing off in search of the witches who killed Joe? That seem smart to you?”

 

Crow didn’t seem inclined to answer, so Rat said, “It’s good to know what’s out there. It’s… intelligence, and… and strategy. And that.”

 

Davey nodded and said, “Wait. Here.” His voice made it clear that they were going to do what he said. He stalked back toward the camp, and Rat and Crow looked at each other, their eyes wide. 

 

It was hard to say how long it was until Davey came back; it had felt like a small eternity. When he returned, he found that they’d barely moved. He was carrying a bulging saddlebag slung over one arm, as if he didn’t even feel the weight of it. He set it down on the ground next to them, zipped it open so they could see it was full of rations and ammunition, enough to last for a few days, at least. Then he zipped it again and fastened it onto the side of the bike. The bike tilted a little, and Crow compensated automatically. 

 

“What…?” Rat asked, completely bewildered. 

 

“You’re on a mission that I set you, now,” Davey said. “So you’re going to come back and tell me what you find, or I’m going to hunt you down. I want to know what’s going on at the Citadel. If they’re as bad as people say. And if they’re not…” For the first time that they’d known them, Davey hesitated. “I want to know if they’ve got room for a few more.”

 

Crow and Rat nodded, and Davey clapped a hand on Crow’s shoulder hard enough to rattle her teeth in her head. “You’ll come back and tell me,” he said, voice again allowing no room for argument. Then he turned and made his way back to the camp. 

 

Crow and Rat looked at each other in astonishment, then Crow rolled her shoulders and gave a shaky grin. “You heard the man.”

 

Rat hopped up on the bike behind her, and she kicked the bike into life, wobbling for a little way with the unused-to weight of the extra saddlebag but straightening out quickly. They motored into the desert in the direction of adventure and answers. 

 

***

 

It took them three days to reach the outskirts of the Citadel’s land. It would have taken less time if they’d driven straight there, but they stayed off the main routes, dodging from rocky outcrop to rocky outcrop, hugging the edges of dunes, trying to stay as safe from being seen from afar as they could in the wasteland. There were only two of them, after all. 

 

They were stingy with the food and water supplies that Davey had given them. They hoped they could go there, check things out under the Citadel’s radar, and go back the same way, taking less than ten days, but there were a lot of ways things could go wrong. 

 

Luckily, they didn’t meet anyone on the way there, at least not close enough to require fighting or fleeing. They saw a few small war bands in the distance, took a couple of night rides to make up for time lost hiding during the day, but managed to stay out of sight. 

 

When they made camp, they didn’t talk much. They’d been around each other for long enough that they needed few words to understand each others’ thoughts and feelings, and besides, they were both too excited for a lot of speaking. 

 

Rat was, as always, excited just to be out under the open sky, unencumbered with other people who annoyed him as much as they protected him, but he knew that Crow had a different excitement in her mind. She always wanted to _discover_ , to see something new. He thought it was a stupid desire, although he’d never tell her; there wasn’t much that was new out in the desert, just the same sand and blood, and the unexpected would probably just kill them. But as long as they were moving in the same direction, it didn’t matter much to Rat if they were thinking of different things.

 

Finally, in the early morning of the third day, they came to a low, scrubby hill and saw a metal pillar at the top of it. They approached it carefully, knowing by reputation about the markers that Joe had put up to mark his territory, but they didn’t see anyone else around. They stopped the bike a little ways away from the base of the hill and looked at the pillar through their binoculars. 

 

There were still scraps of white and red paint here and there on the pillar, but it had clearly been sanded down recently. In place of whatever Joe had decided should be painted onto it, there was now a single, wide, vertical green stripe. 

 

“Huh,” Rat said as he lowered the binoculars. “You’d think red would be more their style. The witches, I mean. All the stories where they have a thirst for blood, and all.”

 

Crow was already swinging her leg back over the bike. “That’s not the only thing the stories say.”

 

“What do you mean?” Rat stowed the binoculars and took his place behind her again. 

 

“Sometimes they say that the witches can heal with magic, or make plants grow out of barren soil just with a thought.”

 

“I thought you didn’t believe in witches, anyway?”

 

“I don’t.” Crow kicked the bike into life again. “I’m just saying,” she called over the noise of the engine, and Rat grabbed hold of her as she wheeled the bike back into motion.

 

They found a hilly area, full of dips in the level of the ground, invisible from the roads, and stashed the bike there. They had a brief, conflicted argument about its safety; it was probably a bad idea to leave it unprotected, but it was also a bad idea for either of them to approach the Citadel alone. And there were only two of them, after all. 

 

In the end, they camouflaged the bike as well as they could and trusted to the natural hiding place. They made their way to the Citadel as carefully as they could, staying off the roads and wearing sand-colored clothing. They knew that the Citadel opened onto a narrow gorge, so they tried to stay as far from the actual gates as they could while still finding a high place from which they could look down at the entrance. 

 

They found a good position just as the sun was reaching its highest point. Miserable as it was to be exposed under the boiling sun, it was the best possible time for it: the Citadel was quiet, everyone avoiding the worst of the day’s heat. 

 

Crow huddled in the meager shade of a jumble of rocks, and Rat pressed up against her, trying to get into the shadow, as well. 

 

“What do you see?” he asked, wishing she’d be quicker about handing over the binoculars. 

 

“There’s… people,” she said finally, pulling the binoculars away from her eyes. Rat snatched them before she could change her mind and look through them again. 

 

“What kind of people?” he asked, moving the binoculars around until he found the Citadel with their lenses. 

 

“No kind, really. But there’s a lot of them.”

 

Rat saw what she meant. There weren’t any people where the sunlight hit, but there were doors, big and small, left open all down the face of the Citadel to let fresh air flow through. And through those doors, Rat could see as much activity as an anthill. 

 

Just above the gates was a wide open space full of cars and people working on them, checking their engines, examining shelves full of spare parts. Some of them had shaved heads, many of them had visible scars, but none of them wore the white and black paint of Joe’s War Boys. There were men and women, young and old, moving around each other as if they were used to each other, as if they were used to the place, calm and purposeful. 

 

Lifting the lenses, he saw, through smaller doors and windows, other people of all types going about their business. No one was running. No one was screaming. 

 

And there, at the top of the face, right where it would get the most sun, through a mesh of metal and glass he could see glimpses of green. It was harder to make out, but he thought he could see movement there, too, and he swallowed hard as he couldn’t keep himself from imagining it. Joe’s water and greenery had been legendary, but he’d never stopped to think what it would be like for that legend to come to life, to be able to walk under and around real, live, growing things.

 

He lowered the binoculars and looked at the gates with his naked eyes. The drawbridge was up, but the place where it would be lowered had a pillar on either side, each painted with the same green stripe. There were no bodies, no tortured souls left out as a warning to others. There was no blood. 

 

He wasn’t sure what he was looking at. His hand was shaking slightly. _There would be shade, under the leaves_ , he thought stupidly. _Old-timers say plants smell like something all their own. The smell would be everywhere, up there where those people are. You’d be able to hear the plants moving._

 

Wordlessly, he passed the binoculars back to Crow. She lifted them to her eyes and looked, and after a while passed them back. They didn’t even really register the time passing as they lay on their stomachs in the dirt, handing the binoculars back and forth and trying to soak up as much as they could see of that calm, unhurried world, the hints of something magical growing above the warren where all those people went about their days. 

 

It caught them completely by surprise when the Citadel suddenly sprang into more hurried motion. Rat actually jumped a bit, startled. People were rushing into the big space with the cars, and a group of three people had clustered around the controls for the drawbridge. As he watched, more and more people flooded into the garage. Crow touched his shoulder and pointed to the balcony where Joe used to stand and make his pronouncements. It was filling up with people, too. 

 

With a roar, four cars came to life and lined themselves up, orderly as clockwork, on the drawbridge. A chant began, a call, thrumming deep with many voices, from the people on the people on the balcony and an answering response from the people in the garage. The drawbridge began to inch its way toward the ground.

 

“We have to get out of here,” Rat hissed. 

 

Crow nodded, but then her eyes widened. “Rat,” she whispered, “do you hear what they’re saying?”

 

“A spell!” Rat said, growing desperate and tugging at Crow’s sleeve. 

 

But then he listened more closely and the roar of the voices resolved themselves into words.

 

_Go safe._

 

_Come back safe_. 

 

There were no howls of anger or frenzy echoing over the chant. Just those words. 

 

“We have to go,” Rat said, strangely reluctant to leave.

 

Crow nodded. “We do.”

 

They crawled, heads down, until they were out of sight of the Citadel. They didn’t talk about what they’d seen or heard, just made their way back in the direction of the bike. 

 

***

 

It was several hours later that Crow finally broke the silence.

 

“So what do you think?” she asked, sarcasm heavy in her voice. “A bunch of fearsome witches, huh? Nothing but blood and murder and dark magic, right?”

 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rat said, a little more harshly than he had intended. He couldn’t stop thinking about what it might be like to walk, calm and secure, through all that green. 

 

“We have to, though,” Crow persisted. “We have to figure out what we’re going to say about that place to Davey, when we get back.”

 

“It looked… safe,” Rat said, uncertain. 

 

“It did,” Crow said, her voice quieter. Traveling with Davey’s people was the safest they’d ever been, but even then they all had to guard each others’ backs, had to be on the lookout for danger coming up from the desert. What would safety even feel like?

 

In the distance, now, they could see the place they’d left the bike, just a shadow in the line of sand. They’d be on their way home, such as it was, soon enough. 

 

Rat was too deep in thought, he was too off guard, he wasn’t watching his back like he should be. He’d let himself get too caught up in dreams of green.

 

Crow stopped dead and he turned to look at her. “What…?”

 

A moment later, he heard what she had heard: familiar sounds, the faint _whirr_ of a vehicle-mounted gun being rotated for aim, the _click_ of its magazine slotting home. 

 

Crow moved first, springing at Rat and toppling him into the sand with her body on top of his. He heard a spattering of bullets, a scream of pain, distant whoops and shrieks and the growl and chug of a poorly maintained engine starting up. 

 

He tried to move Crow off him, but she wasn’t helping him, jerking her limbs strangely. Somewhere nearby was an almost human wailing sound. He got a good line of sight over her shoulder and saw a car come roaring over the top of a dune, out of its hiding place, full of three, maybe four men in ragged, disintegrating clothing, their skin sun-blistered and their eyes white and rolling. Feral. The one manning the gun wasn’t even looking at them, grinning up at the sky as he swung the barrel to fire again. 

 

At the same time he registered that, he realized that the wail was coming from Crow. He gripped her shoulders tightly and rolled them so that he could look down at her. She was pale, her eyes nearly as wide as the ferals’ were, and her entire left side was sticky and red. 

 

“Rat,” she said. Her voice was thick, like she’d been drinking. 

 

“Hang on,” he shouted, scrabbling with hands that had somehow become covered in her blood, trying to get the gun out of the holster at her hip. She was the better shot, he was better in a scrap, so he kept their brass knuckles and she kept their only gun, but if he could just get it out of the damned holster he knew he could…

 

“Rat, go,” she said, pushing weakly at his arm. 

 

“Shut up,” he said, finally yanking the gun free. “No. Put your hands on the bullet hole, press down hard.”

 

He rolled again and came up on his knees, holding the gun firmly in both hands just like Crow had taught him. But the ferals were no longer looking at him. They were staring off to their right, and the one at the wheel was yanking the car into a precariously sharp turn. 

 

Through the panicked ringing in his ears, Rat realized he was hearing more than one engine. From somewhere came the sound of clean and healthy engines. 

 

Four cars erupted over the crest of a hill to the right in a spray of sand, shining silver under the sun. Each of them had a wide green stripe painted on its hood. 

 

The ferals' whoops and yells sounded more fearful now, and they tore off in the opposite direction, pursued by three of the painted cars. The fourth peeled away from the pack and came in Rat and Crow’s direction. 

 

Rat had the gun in his hand, but he hesitated, frozen. One gun wouldn’t be enough to make a difference, not against a car this well put together; it might as well be a Citadel on wheels. But if he didn’t have to shoot…

 

A wet red hand touched his arm again. “Rat,” Crow said, her voice faint, “go. Run, go. The bike…”

 

“No, no,” Rat snapped, and took one hand off the gun to grab hold of hers. Their fingers were slippery against each other. He didn’t look at the deeper, glistening red splashed all over her stomach and chest. “No, so stop saying that.”

 

The painted car pulled to a skidding stop in front of them, the driver side facing them. The driver’s window rolled down, and a shaven-headed woman stared him down through it, completely unafraid. 

 

“Put the gun down, kid,” the woman said. “We have a first-aid kit in the car, and your friend needs it.”

 

Rat hesitated, glanced at Crow. She was still gamely pressing down on the side of her stomach, gritting her teeth, but her eyes were unfocused. 

 

“Sorry, Crow,” Rat said, setting the gun down on the sand. He bent over Crow and knocked her trembling hands aside, pressing down against the slippery wound himself. 

 

The door opened and the woman with the shaved head stepped out, tall and imposing. Behind her came a a boy with a thin scruff of newly grown hair and, last of all, two girls, maybe Rat and Crow’s age or a bit older, one brown-skinned and short-haired and the other pale with long red braids. 

 

Rat stared at them in utter amazement. They were wearing worn, sensible desert clothes, not robes or tattered black dresses, and the short-haired one had a smudge of motor oil on her cheek, but they were unscarred and lovely and seemed almost otherworldly. They had to be…

 

“You’re the witches,” Rat said. “The ones who tore off Joe’s face with magic.”

 

The two girls looked at each other with their eyebrows raised. The boy took a box out of the back of the car and followed the shaven-headed woman over to kneel beside Crow. 

 

“Move your hands,” the shaven-headed woman said, and Rat did so. The shock of the fight was wearing off, and he felt stunned and shaky and afraid. 

 

“We’re not witches,” the red-haired girl said distractedly, watching the boy pop open the box and hand the woman what looked like clamps, needles, bandages. “We didn’t use magic to kill Joe.”

 

“No,” the short-haired girl said, “we used good old-fashioned violence for that.” She grinned at Rat but he couldn’t make any answer; he just stared dumbly.

 

“Ow,” Crow said, voice faint and dazed, as the woman and the boy at her side wiped away blood and started laying down bandages.

 

“It’s a through-and-through,” the shaven-headed woman said, “but she’s lost a lot of blood. She needs more than field first aid. Get her in the car.”

 

“Wait,” Rat said, finding his voice at last. “Wait, where are you taking her?”

 

The two girls, the witches, had helped lift Crow, and Rat scrambled to his feet after them. 

 

“Careful,” the shaven-headed woman said to them, then glanced at Rat. “We’re taking her back to the Green Place. To treat her. Want to come?”

 

She said it so matter-of-factly, so surely, that Rat had followed her to the door of the car before he realized what he was doing. 

 

Crow brushed her bloody hand against his sleeve. “Davey,” she whispered. “We promised.”

 

“Oh,” Rat said, his heart sinking. 

 

“What is it?” the woman asked. 

 

“I… We promised. We have to tell our people what we saw. I… We have to go back.”

 

Crow had been loaded into the back of the car by that point, into a broad flat space that had been built into the trunk. Rat looked desperately at her.

 

“She can’t go,” said the woman. “You know that.”

 

“We’ll take care of her,” the girl with the red hair said. “You just have to trust us.”

 

Rat looked at them all, the witches and their companions, their hands stained with Crow’s blood. They could take Crow back to their Citadel, kill her and use her for black magic, but they didn’t need a trick to do that. There was blood on their hands because they’d tried to help. 

 

Maybe Crow was right. Maybe there were new things to discover, after all. 

 

“Alright,” Rat said. He looked at Crow. His heart was in his throat; his memories of a time before Crow were all fractured and blurry, gray and miserable, but he didn’t have a choice now. “I’ll come back. I’ll see you soon.”

 

She didn’t answer, and he nodded and turned sharply around, grabbed the gun off the ground, and made his way back to the bike. He didn’t look back, even when he heard the engine snarl to life and the car drive away. 

 

***

 

The perimeter sweep had been fairly standard, at first. The shift at the Watchtower had sounded the alarm, having seen a strange car inside the Green Place’s territory. Just one car, with a machine gun mounted, so they’d decided to send out four cars to see them off. 

 

The Green Place had sent word out that all who wanted to come to them peacefully were welcome, but that they wouldn’t tolerate anyone approaching with violence. The incursions by parties who thought they’d be weak, easy pickings with Joe gone, had trailed off as people started to realize they were willing to defend themselves, but there were still a few small bands of ferals who just wanted to fight for the sake of fighting who tried to get through the perimeter and were seen off.

 

Furiosa hadn’t expected the victims of the feral attack. They must have snuck into their territory very carefully.

 

Furiosa drove carefully, trying not to jostle the people in the back of the car. Capable, Toast, and Ro, a former War Boy who had been training with Furiosa to learn some medicine, clustered around the injured girl, making sure her condition didn’t get any worse.

 

“How is she?” Furiosa called back.

 

“Stable,” Toast said. 

 

“Yeah,” said Ro. “She’ll make it to the Green Place, no problem.”

 

“What’s your name?” Capable asked the girl. The girl whispered something back. “Okay, Crow,” Capable said, keeping her voice cheerful. “We’re almost there, you’ll be alright.”

 

“Witches,” Toast snorted. “That kid thought we were witches.”

 

Furiosa smiled at the word “kid.” The boy and girl were a couple of younger than the Wives, at most. “Maybe that’s why the gardens have been growing so well,” she said. “Dag’s black magic.” She glanced in the rear-view mirror and her smile softened a little when she saw Capable holding the injured girl, Crow’s, hand and Toast brushing her hair back from her sweaty forehead as Ro took her pulse with his fingers against her neck. 

 

Furiosa turned her eyes back to the road, content to drive and to take care not to jostle her people. 

 

***

 

“I heard they can invade your dreams and kill you through them.”

 

“I hear the entire Citadel is full of skeletons that walk around and do work for them.”

 

“No, that’s not the way I hear it. I heard they take injured people out of the desert and heal them just by looking at them.”

 

“What, to make slaves out of them?”

 

“I don’t know why. No one knows. But they took one of Davey’s people that had been shot and healed her, just like that, and then Davey took all the rest of his people to the Citadel to live. At least that’s what I heard.”

 

And the whispers went on and on.


End file.
